A Wicked Snow

Chapter Twenty-four

For everyone involved in the Logan case, back then and the years hence, there would be no concrete answers. Only lingering questions, spiraling mysteries, and leads made of mirages. If alive, Claire Logan was the cleverest of fugitives. She left no tracks. Not a single one. Not ever. The fall of 1980 brought cold weather and gales of wind to Misery Bay. It also brought reality home to Hannah Logan. As she sat staring at the newspaper, she found herself back in the journalism classroom at Misery Bay Senior High. She had been a junior then with ambitions of becoming a magazine editor, perhaps in New York. Anywhere, she had thought, anywhere, but Oregon. Far, far away.

A headline stopped her heart for just a moment: WOMAN ARRESTED IN MILWAUKEE, COULD IT BE CLAIRE LOGAN?

Hannah’s eyes bulged. She looked around, self-conscious that others were staring at her. Could they see the flush on her face, the blood draining into a pool in her stomach? No one, it seemed, paid her any mind. The school paper’s editor flirted with the photographer, a girl, about going into the darkroom to “see what develops.” Hannah put her head down and read. The article described a food service worker who had been picked up for writing hot checks in several Wisconsin towns. She’d used the name Claire Logan—“the name of the notorious serial killer from Oregon”—on a phony bank account. The article went on further to describe the woman as dark-haired, about five-foot-five and 155 pounds. Hannah knew it was not her mother. This lady had brown eyes. As resourceful as Claire Logan had been in her life, dying her eyes was not something even she could do.

The periodic jolts brought by seeing her mother’s name in print had a strange and unique rhythm. Like a rope swing caught in the crotch of a tree, the wind would come and drop it free to swing once more. The news accounts were like that. Every now and then the rope would fall from the sky and Hannah would be there to face her mother’s name. She wasn’t the only one who had to live that way, and she didn’t feel sorry for herself because of that.

In her own way, Hannah shared a bond with many she had never met. There was the little girl who had been trapped in a Vermont storm drain and had been rescued by neighbors after a six-day ordeal. There was the boy from Pittsburgh who had escaped Dante Richards, the serial killer, and testified against him. And the four-year-old girl who had been the sole survivor of a 747 crash in Bogotá in 1969. All of them were children of scandal or circumstance.

Because they made good copy, reporters would not leave them alone. The obligatory five-years-after stories turned into ten years after, then fifteen… all the while reopening sores with the hot and dirty knife of the media. None of the children of notorious events could be allowed the freedom to forget. Of course, Hannah knew well that forgetting was utter fantasy. Nothing so terrible can be forgotten. But all she wanted—all the others had wanted—was a chance to get on with their own lives. They deserved and hoped for a chance at being normal. But that was never to be, though in time the headlines would shrink, the interest would ebb. But it could not be completely disregarded. There was always the angle. Always and forever.

When the phone rang late at night or when the answering machine was a staccato recording of hang-up calls, Hannah felt certain it was a reporter. It almost had to be. They called to get the story. They called to see how she was. The woman who had written the book Twenty in a Row had been the worst offender. She had cast herself as an expert on the Claire Logan case. Marcella Hoffman had parlayed Hannah’s family’s tragedy into a livelihood, and for that, Hannah Griffin hated her. For that, if there was a choice between writers who would get to update the story—if, in fact, there was no stopping it—Hoffman would not be the one.

Hannah had seen Hoffman on a television morning show the week before the tenth anniversary of the nightmare. By that time she and her aunt called the author “Dog Face” or “DF.” She was being asked the whereabouts of Claire’s daughter—Hannah—as though she had some claim on her.

“Where her daughter, now twenty-three or twenty-four, has gone, I can’t really say,” Hoffman said.

“Can’t say, or don’t know?” the flashbulb-eyed interviewer probed, obviously annoyed at the evasiveness of the author.

“Let me put it this way,” she said with supreme self-assuredness. “When Hannah Logan wants to come out and greet the world with her recollections of what happened in Rock Point, Oregon, it’ll be in response to my request.”

Hannah couldn’t believe the puffed-up Hoffman’s remarks. Over your dead body, she thought. Add another number to your book title and make it Twenty-One in a Row. I will never talk to you.

When Hannah finally broke down and purchased a copy of Hoffman’s Twenty in a Row, she hid it from her aunt and uncle. She kept the paperback in the bottom drawer of the jewelry box they had given her for Christmas the year after it happened. It. She didn’t even like to refer to what it was. But after it happened she had braved her way into a used bookstore to buy a copy. The saleswoman was a pretty, though somewhat pointy-nosed, woman nearly waist deep in romance novels that evidently another patron had brought in to sell or swap. She paid little attention to the pretty teenager who had come inside to browse.

Hannah found the book and gingerly removed it from the shelf. It had a slight musty smell, and the pages had swelled slightly as though the previous owner had brought the book to the bathtub. Hannah didn’t even hold the book, but rather pinched a corner as though it would electrocute her. The words Twenty in a Row were written in an incongruous, delicate Roman lettering. Small drops of red blood clung to the letters’ baseline. A photograph of what someone thought could pass for the Christmas tree farm was placed at a forty-five-degree angle; its edges ripped to roughness that implied great haste, ruin, or a designer’s hackneyed sense of cleverness. It didn’t look like their house, and that brought Hannah a small measure of comfort. As far as she knew, the only photos that remained of the Logan’s farm—pre-fire—were those taken by families who had visited the holiday wonderland, sat on Santa’s lap, fed the “reindeer,” and the like. None of those, at least none of what surfaced, showed the house beyond a few way-off-in-the-distance shots. The other photos of the house that were known to exist at one time belonged to the files of the Spruce County tax assessor. Those disappeared six months after Marcus Wheaton’s trial. Souvenir hunters, probably.

“You like true-life mysteries, do you?” the bookseller said while the pretty teenager nudged the paperback on the counter.

Hannah said nothing at first. She fished through her front pocket for a five-dollar bill. “I guess so,” she finally answered.

“I prefer Agatha Christie,” the clerk offered as she rang up the sale. “I take great comfort, great personal assurance, in reading material that’s not going to give me nightmares because it’s true.”

“My aunt’s the same way,” Hannah said. She had wanted the book so bad, for so long. It was a peculiar kind of desire, and she knew it. She was drawn to the book and repulsed by what it represented at the same time.

The woman counted out the change. “Four dollars and fifty cents back at you.”

Hannah feigned a smile. It was a robotic response, one that she’d perfected after her world collapsed. At times she was an automaton. She used automatic response for Christmas, for birthdays, when babies were born. Whenever the moment called for a smile, when she had none to give. But this? This smile was part of a mask. Masks were necessary. She was certain it was a defense mechanism designed to save her from her past. But the book, the book brought back so much. It was strange. Twenty in a Row cost fifty cents. Fifty cents? Half a buck was all the tragedy was worth?

“Enjoy the book,” the woman called out.

Hannah said nothing more as she slipped past the fetid stack of paperbacks waiting to be shelved and hurried to the bus stop. She wondered if she’d ever be able to read the book or if she had even really wanted to. A trash can five steps from where the bus door swung open caught her eye. She felt herself loosen her grip on the book. It was slipping from her fingers. And, she almost threw it away. But she didn’t. She’d have to read it. How could she not? In some small way, she knew it was her story. She flipped through the book and the word “cyanide” leapt off a page:

CLAIRE LOGAN STOOD at the counter of Elements, Inc., a chemical supply company in the industrial area just outside of Eugene. Her hair was up, her lips painted a dark red, and her eyes flashed intelligence and authority. Her perfume was jasmine.

“I have gigantic mole problems,” she said without a trace of irony. “Big ones. And I want to take every goddamn one of them out. They are ruining my garden.”

The young man at the counter turned down his cassette player and Elton John’s voice went to a whisper.

“We can recommend some pesticides for that. Rid-it-Fast is a good one.”

Claire shook her head. “That won’t do,” she said, putting her purse down on the counter and pulling out her checkbook. “I want a pound of sodium cyanide.”

The young man made a face. “That’s enough to kill every mole in Spruce County,” he said. “You sure you need that much? I mean, there are other ways, to kill ’em, you know.”

“Look,” she said, her demeanor suddenly shifting to extreme irritation. “I’ve tried everything. I’ve poured gas on them. I’ve flooded their burrows with the garden hose. I’ve even driven spikes through their velveteen bodies. I want something that will kill them fast, once and for all.”

The young man nodded. He felt uneasy, but he didn’t say so. “Okay, I guess. Though I think you’re overreacting.”

She pointed to the sign hanging behind him.

ELEMENTS, INC., THE HOMETOWN CHEMICAL COMPANY. WE’RE HERE FOR YOU

She no longer smiled. “If you’re here for me as your sign proclaims, then you’ll tell me how much a pound of the poison will cost me?”

The young man took out a records book and thought that the woman was a complete bitch.

“Name?” he asked.

“Mrs. Logan. Claire Logan.”

“You know, Mrs. Logan, you really need to be careful with this stuff. Even the slightest bit can kill a man in about five minutes. Suffocates him at the cellular level.”

“Thanks, but I know what I’m doing.” She got out her checkbook. “Five minutes, you say?”